Isolation Cottages: How Social Distancing and Quarantine Helped our Ancestors Overcome Disease Charlotte Greenham (MM Hu) For the past year the world has been fighting a virus. We have intermittently been in an enforced isolation period in the UK since March. It has been an ‘unprecedented’ situation. Or has it? Throughout human history our species – like all others on the planet - has been plagued with various diseases, many taking the form of widespread epidemics. Although, the past year has been extremely testing and unusual, many of our ancestors will have gone through very similar experiences with smallpox, black death, cholera, tuberculosis, typhus, leprosy; the list goes on. I have been looking into how English society dealt with these previous epidemics when medicine wasn’t developed enough to create vaccines so quickly and when there was limited research into how these diseases spread. Our ancestors didn’t have the technology to investigate diseases like we do today, but they realised that isolation was the key to halting the spread of disease from previous experiences. Many areas were designated for the treatment and isolation of the sick, with geographical isolation being the key to success. In rural communities, where there were no large local hospitals to take care of the sick, and pest houses were built to contain contagious persons and halt the spread of disease. The name ‘pest’ house comes from the French word for the plague: la peste, as they are believed to have first been used during one of the plague epidemics. They were situated well away from the villages, with few - or no - visitors allowed. Anyone with symptoms of a current epidemic or any contagious disease would be forced to quarantine in the pest house. Some were allowed to isolate in homes with their family to care for them, but the vast majority of cases came to the local pest house. The poor were the responsibility of the village and churchwardens, and the main body of patients tended to be the poor. Therefore, paupers were sent to pest houses, with their medical fees paid by the villagers out of the poor rates. Cemeteries were often situated nearby for the obvious reason that death was frequent. There was little care for the sick due to fear about catching the disease, and only a few brave caretakers who had been previously exposed to diseases such as smallpox (and therefore were immune) were there to care for the sick. It is surprising how much was known about disease as early as the 14th century, with immunity being understood and spread of disease via close contact being taken into account. Many pest houses had cross-ventilation to remove pathogens as quickly as possible, and partitions between patients prevented different diseases from being spread between the sick. The methods used many hundreds of years ago are very similar to how we have dealt with the Covid-19 pandemic.
In my own village, Ashbury, there is a house situated far away from the rest of the village, next to a spring for regular washing and sanitation, just like many other pest houses. It has been passed down through word of mouth that this is the village isolation cottage but there are no records that I have found to confirm this. However, a dispute in 1796 over an unlucky boy from Ashbury who contracted smallpox is recorded, and led to four different local villages being involved in his treatment. Thomas Chivers had gone to the Lady Day fair in 65
